contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian mission

Sep 13, 2014

... Traditionally, people get around their houses, neighborhoods and cities with the help of an internal "cognitive map." But that system isn't much of a map at all. It's more like a personal library filled with discrete bits of knowledge, landmarks (a bus stop, a church, a friend's house), and routes. When faced with a new wayfinding task, the brain assembles a plan from those elements. It's hard work, and its exact mechanism remains a subject of dispute among neuroscientists.

Digital navigation is in some ways a radical break from the type of planning our parents did. "When people plan a route based on their mental representation, they have to form a sequence of these landmarks, and follow this plan by reaching landmark after landmark," Stephan Winter, a professor of geomatics at the University of Melbourne, tells me. "When people use navigation systems, they don't do this planning any longer."

Experts who study the issue are concerned that spatial thinking might be the next casualty of technological progress, another cognitive ability surpassed and then supplanted by the cerebral annex of the Internet. "Basically, people don't really learn their environments," says Haosheng Huang, who works at the Research Group in Cartography at the Vienna University of Technology. They worry we may become, as a society, what the Japanese call hōkō onchi—deaf to direction. ...

... In a handful of studies conducted over the last decade in the United States, England, Germany and Japan, researchers have shown that GPS navigation has a generally pernicious effect on the user's ability to remember an environment and reconstruct a route. ...

... Isn't it ironic: the easier it is for me to get where I'm going, the less I remember how I got there. ...

... "I think the parallel with the 19th century actually says the addition of the digital dynamic is going to expand context, make people more geographically literate," says David Rumsey, whose extensive map collection testifies to the cartographic trends of past generations. "I don't think it leads to a loss of spatial consciousness—I think it's exactly the opposite." ...

Aug 05, 2014

"... According to Palaniappan, the real culprit here is the very concept of the payday. The way he see is, there’s no reason people who already have done their work should have to wait several days, or even weeks, to get the money they’ve rightfully earned. So, in May, Palaniappan launched ActiveHours. The Palo Alto startup, which recently raised $4.1 million, makes an app that allows hourly workers to immediately access pay they’ve already earned, without having to wait for their employer’s standard pay cycle.

What’s more, there are no fees. Instead, ActiveHours makes money on tips, asking users to pay what they want. “We’re trying to build something that’s completely aligned with the consumer, unlike what people are used to today in typical financial services, where it’s, in some ways, adversarial,” he says.

Palaniappan is far from the only entrepreneur who sees opportunity in creating an alternative to the payday loan. LendUp, for instance, has raised $64 million to offer loans with lower interest rates that become cheaper over time. ZestFinance, launched by an ex-Googler, is similar. But even these players still rely on fees, both for profit and protection. In this demographic, after all, there tends to be a high rate of delinquency, so even the most upstanding lenders typically account for those losses upfront. But with its no-fee model, AfterHours is a radical departure.

It’s also riskier. The company is betting that when given the choice, its customers—already struggling financially—will still pay for the service it provides. “Some people look at the model and think we’re crazy,” Palaniappan says, “but we tested it and found the model is sufficient to building a sustainable business.”

Feb 06, 2014

Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.

To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991. ...

... Considering only memory, processing, and broadband communications power, duplicating the iPhone back in 1991 would have (very roughly) cost: $1.44 million + $620,000 + $1.5 million = $3.56 million.

This doesn’t even account for the MEMS motion detectors, the camera, the iOS operating system, the brilliant display, or the endless worlds of the Internet and apps to which the iPhone connects us.

This account also ignores the crucial fact that no matter how much money one spent, it would have been impossible in 1991 to pack that much technological power into a form factor the size of the iPhone, or even a refrigerator.

Tim Lee at The Switch noted the imprecision of the original analysis and correctly asked how typical analyses of inflation can hope to account for such radical price drops. (Harvard economist Larry Summers recently picked up on this point as well.)

But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it is to think in exponential terms.

- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf

Tim Lee at The Switch noted the imprecision of the original analysis and correctly asked how typical analyses of inflation can hope to account for such radical price drops. (Harvard economist Larry Summers recently picked up on this point as well.)

But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it is to think in exponential terms. ...

Indeed!

To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991. - See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf

Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.

To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.

- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf

Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.

To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.

- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf

Amazing! Today’s iPhones have the same capabilities (and more!) than 13 distinct electronics gadgets, worth more than $3,000, found in a 1991 Radio Shack ad. Buffalo writer Steve Cichon was the first to dig up the old ad and make the point about the seemingly miraculous pace of digital advance, noting that an iPhone incorporates the features of the computer, CD player, phone, “phone answerer,” and video camera, among other items in the ad, all at a lower price. The Washington Post‘s tech blog The Switch picked up the analysis, and lots of people then ran with it on Twitter. Yet the comparison was, unintentionally, a huge dis to the digital economy. It massively underestimates the true pace of innovation and, despite its humor and good intentions, actually exposes a shortcoming that plagues much economic and policy analysis.

To see why, let’s do a very rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate of what an iPhone would have cost in 1991.

- See more at: http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/#sthash.BtbAXb4D.dpuf

Jan 16, 2014

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...

As the author notes, we have challenges but we hardly descending into some global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are a three examples. It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to the death rates for Europe/USA in the 20th century. And then there is this:

The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing hold the promise of revolutionizing the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.

Oct 05, 2013

More than $1 trillion has been spent on biomedical research over the past 20 years. These investments should soon start yielding longevity dividends.

The number of scientists working on extending the life span worldwide has increased exponentially as computer and communications technologies have entered the mainstream and China and India have joined the race.

The life spans of some laboratory animals have already been extended more than tenfold.

Innovations have already started: vital organs have been grown from patients’ own cells and several stem-cell therapies are being proven.

Cancer survival rates have increased steadily over the past few years. A diagnosis is no longer a certain death sentence.

Fast-food outlets have started offering healthier dishes and displaying caloric content and smoking rates in developed countries have declined.

Many people would not interpret these seven facts as a single trend leading to dramatic increases in life expectancy because the long-term effects are so unpredictable. But just two decades ago, nobody could imagine the possibility of the technology we use daily now. ...

"Non-biodegradable plastic bags are a serious menace to natural ecosystems and present a problem in terms of disposal," says Professor Dusan Losic, ARC Future Fellow and Research Professor of Nanotechnology in the University's School of Chemical Engineering.

"Transforming these waste materials through 'nanotechnological
recycling' provides a potential solution for minimising environmental
pollution at the same time as producing high-added value products." ...

(Nanowerk News) Drexel University nanotechnology researchers
are continuing to expand the capabilities and functionalities of a
family of two-dimensional materials they discovered that are as thin as a
single atom, but have the potential to store massive amounts of energy.
Their latest achievement has pushed the materials storage capacities to
new levels while also allowing for their use in flexible devices. ...

BELLEVUE, Wash. — In a drab one-story building here, set between an
indoor tennis club and a home appliance showroom, dozens of engineers,
physicists and nuclear experts are chasing a radical dream of Bill
Gates.

The quest is for a new kind of nuclear reactor that would be fueled by
today’s nuclear waste, supply all the electricity in the United States
for the next 800 years and, possibly, cut the risk of nuclear weapons
proliferation around the world. ...

... But now Net Power, based in the US state of North Carolina, believes
it can redesign the power plant so it can still run on coal or natural
gas, but without releasing harmful fumes.

Rodney Allam, chief technologist at 8 Rivers Capital, which
owns Net Power, says: "The perception has been that to avoid emissions
of [carbon dioxide] CO2, we have to get rid of fossil fuels.

"But unfortunately, fossil fuels represent over 70% of the
fuel that's consumed in the world and the idea that you can get rid of
that in any meaningful sense is a pipe dream."

The Net Power system is different from currently operating power plants
because carbon dioxide, normally produced as waste when making
electricity, would become a key ingredient when burning the fuel. ...

MOFFETT FIELD, California (AP) — NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D
printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly
reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part
or supply they might ever need.

The printers would serve as a
flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer
upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools.
Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to
build exquisite jewelry.

In NASA labs, engineers are 3-D printing
small satellites that could shoot out of the Space Station and transmit
data to earth, as well as replacement parts and rocket pieces that can
survive extreme temperatures. ...

Currently the idea of the IoT has many definitions. Most include a
world in the not-too-distant future where most objects are computerized
and seamlessly integrated into our information network, creating "smart"
grids, homes, and environments. ...

... This presents a big opportunity for someone who can devise a tasty and
affordable plant-based substitute for meat. That is exactly what Ethan
Brown, the founder and chief executive of a California-based startup
called Beyond Meat,
aims to do, and he has persuaded some smart people to put their money
behind him. Beyond Meat makes vegan "chicken-free" strips that it says
are better for people's health (low-fat, no cholesterol), better for the
environment (requiring less land and water), and better for animals
(obviously) than real chicken; most important, if all goes according to
plan, they will cost less to produce than chicken. Fortune has
learned that Bill Gates is an investor; he sampled the product and said
he couldn't tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken.
"The meat market is ripe for invention," Gates wrote in a blog post
about the future of food. Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture
capital firm, made Beyond Meat its first investment in a food startup.
"KP is looking for big ideas, and this qualifies as a big idea," says
Amol Deshpande, a former Cargill executive and a partner at the venture
firm. "The single biggest inefficiency in agriculture is how we get our
protein." Other investors include Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the
founders of Twitter; Morgan Creek Capital Management; and the Humane
Society of the United States, an animal-welfare group. ...

The Internet is disappearing. And with it goes an important part of our recorded history. That was the conclusion of a studyTechnology Review
looked at last year, which measured the rate at which links shared over
social media platforms, such as Twitter, were disappearing.

The conclusion was that this data is being lost at the rate of 11% within a year and 27% within two years.

Today, the researchers behind this work reveal that all is not lost.
Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in
Norfolk, Va., have found a way to reconstruct deleted material, and they
say it works reasonably well. ...

Earlier this week we presented the thesis from Credit Suisse that not only is 3-D printing not a flash in the pan, existing market research
reports have actually understated its potential market. 3-D printing is
exactly what it sounds like: making 3-D objects from a device that's
conceptually more like a printer than from a typical manufacturing
process.

But we wanted to get a little bit more specific about where exactly this is going to happen.

So with the help of an excellent report from consulting firm CSC,
we now present five industries that are already feeling the effects of
3-D printing's imminent dominance — for better or worse. ...

... The WAND Foundation has developed several dry composting toilet models, some of which were recognized at the 2011 Tech Awards at Santa Clara University. At the conference, Cora Zayas-Sayre, executive director of the WAND Foundation, explained
that by using local materials, the organization has been able to build
275 toilets at a cost of US$30 per toilet. She added that this
innovation has already impacted the lives of 3,000 people.

This innovation simultaneously addresses two challenges that prevail
in developing countries: the unsustainable and costly use of
water-sealed toilets, and the hygienic management of human waste.
Water-sealed toilets require pumping mechanisms to transport water and
sewage between 300 and 500 meters away from the home, a method that is
economically and environmentally unsustainable. Inadequate management of
human waste can lead to a host of health problems in developing areas, and dramatically impact quality of life. ...

... The green-roof movement has slowly been gaining momentum in recent
years, and some cities have made them central to their sustainability
plans. The city of Chicago, for instance, that 359 roofs are now
partially or fully covered with vegetation, which provides all kinds of
environmental benefits — from reducing the buildings' energy costs to
cleaning the air to mitigating the

Late this summer, Chicago
turned a green roof into its first major rooftop farm. At 20,000 square
feet, it's the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the Midwest, according
to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which maintains the farm through its program. ...

8. Interesting piece using driverless cars as an example and the inability of some people to see the potential innovations: The third industrial revolution

... In fact, these possibilities are only the tip of the iceberg.
Autonomous vehicles' most transformative contribution might be what they
get up to when people aren't in the vehicles. One suddenly has
access to cheap, fast, ultra-reliable, on-demand courier service.
Imagine never having to run out for milk or a missing ingredient again.
Imagine dropping a malfunctioning computer into a freight AV to be
ferried off to a repair shop and returned, all without you having to do
anything. Imagine inventories at offices, shops and so on refilling
constantly and as needed: assuming "shops" is still a meaningful concept
in a world where things all come to you.

The really remarkable thing about such possibilities is that the technology is basically available today. It isn't cheap
today, but that may change very quickly. If the public lets it, of
course. When it comes to AVs stagnation, if it occurs, will be the fault
of regulatory rather than technological obstacles.

... In this infographic we trace
the iPhone supply and manufacturing chain. We’re providing snippets of
information on both of the existing flagship model plus early breaking
rumors for the next-gen iPhones. Did you know, for example, that 90% of
all the rare-earth minerals used on an iPhone 5’s circuitry, screen,
speakers, and glass cover are mined in China and Inner Mongolia? And did
you know that Foxconn might soon be overtaken by Pegatron as Apple’s
biggest manufacturing partner in China?

What does the rest of the world contribute to the making of the iPhone? Let’s find out!

May 15, 2013

... The app itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old
freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to
Buycott. “It’s been completely bootstrapped up to this point,” he said.
Martinez and another friend have pitched in to promote the app.

Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making its debut in iTunes and GoogleGOOG +2.28%
Play in early May. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free
app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent
company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate
family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for
instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a
subsidiary of Johnson & JohnsonJNJ +0.56%.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to
boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than
single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling,
will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the
36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory
labeling of genetically modified food. ...

Building data bases of land ownership, Wikipedia-style, would be a cheap and easy way for poor, rural communities to compile a record of property rights and land use, reducing corruption and helping to lessen illegal land grabs.

Imagine whipping out your smartphone, walking the boundaries of your
property, and pressing “Send” to upload a map of your land to a common
databank. You also could attach a photo of a legal contract proving your
tenancy or ownership.

The pressure to record land tenure is mounting worldwide. ...

It seems like this could have a tremendous impact on economic development with the poor.

Mar 09, 2013

1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.

... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages,
but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial
Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began
with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power,
and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic
idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of
interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible
inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third
Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile
phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools;
they have been used for moving information, not for making things.
Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for
the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.

The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the
distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture,
in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance
between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an
audience. ...

... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays
off in a big “whoosh,” but it takes many decades, depending on where
you draw the starting line of course. A look at the early 19th century
is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today. But
it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity
over the longer run.

5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40 minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.

6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future sports. We will even be able to have meaningful sports competition?

The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been
flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is
mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.

"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a
squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond
which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a
decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply
that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some
other metric.

A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."

"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs
generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society
with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually
increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled
occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than
persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."

"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day
urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics,
though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as
being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to
the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that
employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that
somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."

“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”

9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:

The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state: markets where possible; the state where necessary.

"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his
children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her
budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets
a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No
starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this
temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m
actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home
dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy?
Usually I just change the subject. ..."

A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...

... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.

In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.

... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.

But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more,
but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human
embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer,
researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and
tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed
valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a
specific pattern.

Jan 26, 2013

Seriously, technological innovation always creates dislocations. Fear of machines replacing humans goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The economy has always adapted and expect it will again.

Alas, that won't help, as this graph
compiled by statistician Simon Hedlin shows. The total dependency ratio
(children and retirees, compared with those of working age) fell in all
G20/OECD nations bar Germany and Sweden between 1960 and 2010. In the
next fifty years, it will rise in all those nations, bar India and South
Africa. In most nations, the ratio will rise by 40% or more; there are
huge increases in dependency in parts of Asia (China and South Korea)
and in eastern Europe. Britain and America are towards the bottom of the
table, but their problems are big enough.

There are many implications. With more dependents to care for, it is
very hard to imagine how we will pay down our debts. And it is also very
hard to imagine how one can possibly expect government spending to
shrink significantly.

"... BiblioTech, a $1.5 million Bexar County paperless
library will have scores of computer terminals, laptops, tablets, and
e-readers – but not a dog-eared classic or dusty reference book in
sight.

“Think of an Apple store,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who led his county’s bookless library project, told NPR when describing the planned library.

The 4,989-squre-foot, digital-only library, one of the first of its
kind, will feature 100 e-readers available for circulation, 50 e-readers
for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets for
on-site use. Patrons can check out e-readers for two weeks or load books
onto their own devices.

“A technological evolution is taking place,” Wolff says. “And I think we’re stepping in at the right time.” ..."

"In some ways, this shift isn’t as dramatic as it might first appear.
Even though younger evangelicals are increasingly walking away from the
religious right, they are still self-identifying as Republicans (54 percent) more than Democrats (26 percent). Younger
Christians still agree with the religious right on the issues but
reject the movement’s tactics, tone, and narrow focus on social issues."

"Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science
roughly equally (varying across domains), which is why scientists like
E. O. Wilson and organizations like the National Center for Science
Education are reaching out to moderates in both parties to rein in the
extremists on evolution and climate change. Pace Barry Goldwater,
extremism in the defense of liberty may not be a vice, but it is in
defense of science, where facts matter more than faith—whether it comes
in a religious or secular form—and where moderation in the pursuit of
truth is a virtue."

The
AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that
pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form
the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North
America and Asia.

In the United States, half
of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid
middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17
European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6
million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008
through last June.

Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.

"Everything
that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer
scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look
like science fiction." ...

... So machines are
getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those
factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession,
have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five
years, yet continue to operate just as well.

How is that happening?

-Reduced
aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced
the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual
transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district
responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient
bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers. ...

... -In South Korea, Standard Chartered is
expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three,
compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. ...

... -The
British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to
invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty
driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western
Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year.
The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future"
program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.

Like
many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's
furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew -
four people ...

... -Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's
drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with
cars and planes that can get around by themselves. ...

... "Trying to keep it from happening would have
been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the
combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of
technology."

The upside of emerging technology is that most will make goods and services
less expensive. That improves our living standard. The downside is that much of
the work we used to do in order to earn the wages to buy goods and services is
rapidly changing. As the last sentence of the article notes, this is not the
first time we have been in these circumstances. Years ago I read that in 1885,
approximately 80% of everything we consumed in the U.S. was produced at home.
By 1915, 80% was produced outside the home. It created massive economic
dislocations. Each time these disruptions occur it has been hard for the people
living at that time to foresee what the new economic order would look like.

It is critical that Christian thinkers wrestle with the challenges of technological
innovation. Creative destruction (the market dynamic where jobs and industries
are destroyed in the wake of creating new ones) has always been a difficult one
for ethics. It is painful but the social cost of other alternatives is also
quite high. Anti-technological calls to abandon consumerism or, conversely,
just saying that “the market will sort it all out,” are not legitimate
responses. I think topics like this should be at the center of our theological
reflection about human labor and the economy.

Jan 19, 2013

"In general, the church has done a fine job equipping Christians for the "private" areas of their lives: prayer, morality, family life, and so on. However, in general, the church has done a poor job equipping people for the "public" parts of their lives: namely, their work, their vocation. The reality is, most people spend the majority of their time in this latter, "public" area."

2. Can we Survive Technology? Written 57 years ago, Fortune resurrected this article by John von Neumann. The editor's note begins:

Editor's note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, to mark our FutureIssue,
we turn to a feature from June 1955 by John von Neumann tackling the
profound questions wrought by radical technical advancement—in von
Neumann's day the atomic bomb and climate change. von Neumann was one of
the twentieth century's greatest and most influential geniuses. The
polymath and patron saint of Game Theory
was instrumental in developing America's nuclear superiority toward the
end of World War II as well as in framing the decades-long Cold War
with the Soviet Union. In his time, von Neumann was said to possess "the world's greatest mind." Here is his characteristically pessimistic look on what the future holds.

"CONCLUSION: Although "materialists' perceptions that
acquisition brings them happiness appear to have some basis
in reality," that happiness is short-lived, Richins concluded. As such,
"The state of anticipating and desiring a product may be inherently more
pleasurable than
product ownership itself.""

5. One of the most difficult topics to understand in economics is comparative advantage, especially why outsourcing jobs to other countries often is advantageous for both countries. Forbes has a creative piece this week, Is Outsourcing American Jobs Wrong?. However, as the BBC reports American manufacturers come back home, a trend that has been true for a few years now.

"In order to fight that perception and reclaim capitalism and business as
positive words, businesses have to find a purpose beyond just making money. Profit is necessary for business, Mackey said, but it's necessary in the same way that his body has to produce red blood cells. It's needed, but it's not the sole purpose."

3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)

8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently

Jan 07, 2013

... What’s more, after “the initial e-book explosion,” the growth rate
for e-book sales is slowing from triple-digits to about 34 percent in
2012, suggesting that initial spike in growth was an aberration, a
reflection of the technology’s enthusiastic early adopters. In fact, a
survey by Bowker Market Research revealed that 59 percent of Americans
said they had “no interest” in purchasing an e-reader.

That may be
because Americans are shifting from single-purpose e-readers to
multi-purpose tablets. As the article pointed out, sales of e-readers
are plunging while those of tablets are skyrocketing.

But [Nicholas] Carr
sees something deeper in the trend. E-readers have been particularly
well-suited to genre novels, like thrillers and romances, “the most
disposable of books” that we tend to read quickly and not want to hang
onto. By contrast, he notes, we’re less likely to go digital on genres
like literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. “Readers of weightier
fare,” he posits, “seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile
pleasures, of what we still call ‘real books’ – the kind you can set on a
shelf.”

If that’s the case, argues Carr, e-books may be just
another format, “an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback” that
readers use for certain genres, the same way we purchase mass-market
fiction in paperback and cookbooks in hardcover.

Despite my love of technology, I admit I do not own an e-reader and I have no intention of buying one. (I have read some books using a Kindle ap on my computer or iPhone.) Most of what I read is non-fiction. I highlight and take notes. I want access to those notes for years to come. You don't actually own e-reader books and the noting taking strategies all seem more cumbersome and tenuous than writing in a real book. I think Carr is likely on to something. Only time will tell.

Jan 05, 2013

"... Although the number of evangelical churches in the United States
declined for many years, the trend reversed in 2006, with more new
churches opening each year since, according to the Leadership Network’s
most recent surveys. This wave of “church planting” has been highest
among nondenominational pastors, free to experiment outside traditional
hierarchies.

“I hear a lot of pastors say, ‘I’m not just trying to be creative and
avant-garde, I think this is maybe the last chance for me,’ ” said Doug Pagitt, the founder of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

Mr. Pagitt has written several books on church innovations, many of which were first developed in the “emergent” church movement of the last decade or among “missional” churches whose practices focus on life outside the church.

Many of their innovations are being adopted by an increasing number of pastors in the mainstream.

... But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk. ...

"...Launched in July, the Seattle-based Egraphs' business model is simple, but pretty clever. Fans can peruse the company website to see if their favorite athlete has partnered up with Egraphs. Each player's section has a number of professionally shot action photographs included, typically priced between $25 and $50. The fan pays and sends the athlete a message through the website, including some personal details or memories.

The athlete then receives that message on his custom iPad app, using the the information provided to write a personalized note and electronic autograph on the selected photo. The photo is then sent electronically to the fan, who can save it digitally, share it on social media or order a physical print. Revenue is split between company and athlete. ..."

8. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, legalizing abortion across the country. Time magazine has a feature article about the Pro-Choice movement this week that suggests 1973 may have been the high-water mark for the movement. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall. Here is a short clip summarizing their take.

"...Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent Slate piece, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they'll never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, don't have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to prop up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over flimsy copyright claims. ..."

Dec 26, 2012

I know. You own a slim titanium ultrabook computer, an eye popping
LCD 3D HD television, an iPhone with a custom-designed carbon fiber
cover, and a sports car with 360 horsepower under the hood. You don’t
have anything in common with the Amish.

It’s possible. But there are a lot of us who are beginning to adopt
some practices that are pretty close to the Amish. No, I’m not talking
about the Amish belief in adult baptism or the importance of farming in
daily life. I’m talking about the decisions the Amish make about
technology. More and more of us have begun to think about the impact
that technology has on our relationships with others and we’ve begun to
alter our practices.

Contrary to many stereotypes, the Amish actually use a lot of
technology. I’ve seen Amish ride in cars, use power tools, and fire up a
600 horsepower Rolls-Royce generator. But the Amish won’t use just any
technology that is developed. And they don’t allow technologies to be
used by anybody whenever they want. They have developed a complex set of
unwritten rules that guide their daily decisions.

"... Despite
its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for
rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and
conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has
sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of
the health service.

Their success is envied by the centre right
in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to
grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006.
The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right
government had been re-elected after serving a full term.

As the
state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a
former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a
visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all
welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."

"... We
have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly
clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but
also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or
funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community
involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers.
(Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went
to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea:
the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger
idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this
early on.

At a time when the moral framework of America appears
to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the
propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore
values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive
enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and
promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in
business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is
now.

Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the
moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies
setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in
entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish
strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money
must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business,
greater profit will follow. ..."

"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."

More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.

Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.

The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.

Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...

"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."

15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always
talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more
than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last
year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just
one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular
policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.

"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a
result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that
served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive.
The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they
splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old
evangelicalism whimper and wane."

He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.

Dec 15, 2012

(Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

1. Pray for Egypt Today!

More than 50 million Egyptians are voting today on a constitution that would be a giant step backward for Egypt and much of the Middle East, marginalizing women and religious minorities. A nation that has historically been a voice of moderation, the largest Muslim nation in the region, will likely move toward becoming an Islamist state. Remember to pray for Egypt. (See the Economist'sThe Founding Brothers)

2. Our prayers are with families of the victims at the Sandy Hook elementary school. Grace and peace to the entire community.

Traffic deaths in the USA continued their historic decline last year,
falling to the lowest level since 1949, the government announced
Monday.

A total of 32,367 motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians died in 2011,
a 1.9% decrease from 2010. Last year’s toll represents a 26% decline
from 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
said. ...

... The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as
well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The
state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white
students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have
any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health
commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in
the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011....

....The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells. ...

... The research is still in its early stages, and many questions remain.
The researchers are not entirely sure why the treatment works, or why it
sometimes fails. One patient had a remission after being treated only
twice, and even then the reaction was so delayed that it took the
researchers by surprise. For the patients who had no response
whatsoever, the team suspects a flawed batch of T-cells. The child who
had a temporary remission apparently relapsed because not all of her
leukemic cells had the marker that was targeted by the altered T-cells. ...

....In 2011, 1.4 million chlamydia infections were reported to the CDC.
The rate of cases per 100,000 people increased 8%, to 457.6 in 2011 from
423.6 in 2010.

The CDC reported 321,849 gonorrhea infections. The
rate increased 4% to 104.2 cases per 100,000 in 2011 from 100.2 in
2010. Like chlamydia, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease,
a major cause of infertility in women.

Last year, 13,970 primary and secondary syphilis cases were reported. The rate of 4.5 cases per 100,000 was unchanged from 2010. ...

7. You may be bilingual but can you write in two languages, one with each hand, at the same time?!

...
Modernist greens don't dispute the ecological tumult associated with the
Anthropocene. But this is the world as it is, they say, so we might as
well reconcile the needs of people with the needs of nature. To this
end, Kareiva advises conservationists to craft "a new vision of a planet
in which nature—forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient
ecosystems—exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."

This
shift in thinking is already under way. For example, ecologists
increasingly appreciate (and study) the diversity of species and
importance of ecosystem services in cities, giving rise to the
discipline of urban ecology. That was unthinkable at the dawn of the
modern environmental movement 50 years ago, when greens loathed cities
as the antithesis of wilderness. ...

13. One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes I remember from my
childhood was when this woman ends up trapped in a department store at
night. The mannequins begin calling to her. She discovers she is actually a mannequin who
has over stayed her time out in the world and it is time for the next
mannequin to spend some time outside the store. This story confirms my worst nightmares: In Some Stores, the Mannequins Are Watching You

15. One of the biggest concerns about fracking technology is the enormous amount of water it uses. A company has figured out how to recycle water so that far less water is used in the fracking process. Solving fracking's biggest problem

... 3D printing represents the latest version of what industry experts call
"additive manufacturing" — a way to turn practically any computer
designs into real objects by building them up layer-by-layer using
plastics, metals or other materials. The technology could end up
affecting every major industry — aerospace, defense, medicine, transportation, food, fashion — and have an even bigger impact on U.S. manufacturing than the robot revolution. ...

20. Michael Cheshire has a great piece in Leadership Journal on "What I learned about grace and redemption through my friendship with a Christian pariah." Going To Hell with Ted Haggard

".... A while back I was having a business lunch at a sports bar in the
Denver area with a close atheist friend. He's a great guy and a very
deep thinker. During lunch, he pointed at the large TV screen on the
wall. It was set to a channel recapping Ted's fall. He pointed his
finger at the HD and said, "That is the reason I will not become a
Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that's what
keeps me away."

It was well after the story had died down, so I had to study the screen
to see what my friend was talking about. I assumed he was referring to
Ted's hypocrisy. "Hey man, not all of us do things like that," I
responded. He laughed and said, "Michael, you just proved my point. See,
that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and
forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys
can't forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you
talk to me about God, you explain that he will take me as I am. You say
he forgives all my failures and will restore my hope, and as long as I
stay outside the church, you say God wants to forgive me. But that guy
failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to
him." Then he uttered words that left me reeling: "You Christians eat
your own. Always have. Always will."

He was running late for a meeting and had to take off. I, however, could
barely move. I studied the TV and read the caption as a well-known
religious leader kept shoveling dirt on a man who had admitted he was
unclean. And at that moment, my heart started to change. I began to
distance myself from my previously harsh statements and tried to
understand what Ted and his family must have been through. When I
brought up the topic to other men and women I love and respect, the very
mention of Haggard's name made our conversations toxic. Their reactions
were visceral."

21. Leonardo Bonucci got a yellow card for faking collision during a
soccer game. It should have been a red card. No one deserves to be a professional soccer player with acting skills
this bad!

Dec 14, 2012

Despite fears of so-called showrooming, some stores are opening up to wireless internet.

FORTUNE -- For years, retailers frowned on shoppers visiting their
stores merely to scope out products before returning home and buying
them online for less. The phenomenon became so common that it earned a
name -- showrooming.

The practice has only expanded with the proliferation of smartphones.
Shoppers can use them to quickly compare the price of a Fossil handbag,
for example, with the same version on Amazon.com (AMZN). There's
nothing store managers can do to stop them. The shoppers have won the
war.

Recognizing their defeat, many retailers have made a u-turn and are now helping shoppers get online. ...

... To connect to a network, shoppers must first agree to a terms of
service that appears on their smartphone screens. The agreement
generally spells out that the network is not secure and that the stores
will track the Web sites customers visit and the type of devices they
use.

Such data could eventually be used to help stores offer personalized
coupons and identify merchandise to add to their shelves, said Bryan
Wargo, chief executive of Nearbuy Systems, a start-up that helps stores
monitor customer behavior on Wi-Fi networks and dissect the data.
Customers frequently using the Wi-Fi network to search a rival's Web
site for red cashmere sweaters, for instance, could signal that the
store should start stocking them. ...

Dec 12, 2012

The digitisation of the world’s books reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the Top 100 lists for each year are now free to browse online.

The digitisation of the world’s books reveals how the popularity of
English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the
database is now freely browsable online.

Last year, the
Google Books team released some 4 per cent of all the books ever written
as a corpus of digitised text, an event that has triggered something of
a revolution in the study of trends in human thought. The corpus
consists of 5 million books and over 500 billion words (361 billion in
English) dating from the 1500s to the present day.

In a single
stroke, this data gives researchers a way to examine a whole range of
hitherto inaccessible phenomena. Since then a steady stream of new
results has emerged on everything from the evolution of grammar and the
adoption of technology to the pursuit of fame and the role of
censorship. ...

Doc Holiday uses an expression "I'm your Huckleberry," in the movie Tombstone. Basically he was saying, "I'm game." I had never heard that expression befor the movie. I entered that term at the first mention in the books appears to be in 1880. The events depicted in the movie were in 1881. Interesting!

"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation
below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it
full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the
lower left corner. ..."

4. There is a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, that shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as me grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle-age. Turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.

5. The holiday season is in full swing and many people falsely believe this a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was highest and December was lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says

"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.

"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel
is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift
in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just
as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to
play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science
skills early on.

It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions —
they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel
construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit.
The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both
girls — and their fathers — in mind.

“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this
play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr.
Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."

And this reminds me of last year, or the year before, when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.

"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."

"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable
Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the
National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National
Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every
industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise
of making every one of them sustainable.”

It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to
manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has
far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology,
industry and society.

Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable
practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable
materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water
purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy
agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology.
There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable
manner.

In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and—
that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks.
Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products
exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."

"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before
that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via
memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave
sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the
announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook,
with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to
connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of
memorials for the dead."

20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."

Dec 06, 2012

... Many papers have been raising the price of their subscriptions and
news-stand copies, which has helped to stem losses. But a more important
contributor to the change of mood in newspapers is what Ken Doctor of
Outsell, a consultancy, terms a “revolution in reader revenue”.
“Paywalls”, methods of charging readers for online content, have become
popular. The number of American newspapers with some sort of paywall has
at least doubled this year. More than a quarter of newspapers now have
one, and most big groups that do not have plans to charge for digital
access. This is a global trend: newspapers in Brazil, Germany and
elsewhere are fed up with giving away their articles for nothing on the
internet.

Charging for content online used to be the privilege of the lucky few, such as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal,
offering market-sensitive information readers would pay for. General
newspapers opposed charging because they feared their traffic would
drop—and their fragile digital ad revenues would fall rather than rise.

Several factors have changed their mind. For one, technology has got
better and cheaper. Online pay systems were expensive to build and test,
but Press+ changed that. The firm, which was founded in 2010—and was
bought last year by RR Donnelley, a big printing and marketing
firm—licenses the technology for newspapers to erect a pay system in
return for a cut of digital revenues. So far 566 (mostly American)
papers have signed up, and 400 of them have launched.

Tablets and other mobile devices have also been a boon for news
organisations, because they make paid digital subscriptions more
attractive. Many newspapers have started offering “all access” editions,
bundling print and digital subscriptions (sometimes at a slightly
higher price). Executives say that if they can train people to pay for
digital subscriptions, they will be less threatened by print’s
persistent and inevitable decline, since digital editions bring in
fatter margins. ...

... But it has also become clear that digital advertising dollars will never
offset what newspapers are losing in print advertising—which is why
papers want to be less dependent on ad revenue. Advertising, which is
high-margin, has historically contributed around 80% of American
newspapers’ revenues, far more than in most other countries. This is
changing, mostly because advertising has slid so far. In the third
quarter the New York Times earned more than 55%
of its revenues from circulation, compared with only 29% in 2001.
Newspaper bosses say they are moving their papers to a model where they
get half their revenues from advertising and half from circulation. ...

The article goes on to explain that there are still many challenges and paywalls won't work for everyone. Advertising will still need to be a part of the mix and it is unclear of ad revenue decline can be stablized or reversed.

Do you have any pay subscriptions for news? Do you anticipate you would buy online subscriptions for one of your favorite news sources if they create a paywall?

Dec 01, 2012

1. When I was a kid, I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to minute 5:00, and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!

"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."

I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)

15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution in as if it happened in 24 hours.

"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S.
birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable
record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center
for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.

What was
news was Pew’s analysis of the government data, which showed that the
birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. “We were the
first to point that out,” Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew’s
report, said in an interview. ..."

... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of
"strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious
traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly
devout and committed to their faith.

According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference
between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their
religion.

By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points,
with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly
affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics.
Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity
than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."

"Indeed, for America’s Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.

The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."

21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every candidate who is losing often tries to spin things positively until the very end but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis is revealing that was true. From The New RepbulicThe Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win

Nov 28, 2012

JCPenney can offer shoppers something no online retailer can: food and drinks to enjoy while they spend money.

CEO Ron Johnson said the retailer was planning on replacing traditional cash registers with coffee and juice bars, reports Sapna Maheshwari at Bloomberg News. A prototype he showed reporters in August included a Caribou coffee stand. ...

... Johnson has also announced plans to give associates iPads and eliminate most cash registers. ...

Johnson is the guy who introduced selling upscale products at Target and created the Apple birck and mortar model. He recently did away with most of JC Penny's model of using sales and coupons to bring people into the store and sales have suffered as a result. But this was only the first step in a move to remake the JCPenny shopping experience ... and I would say "experience" is the operative word.

Eight years ago, Joseph Pine did a TED Talk What consumers want. He explains that through most of human history we had a commodity economy. We grew things or extracted things from the ground. Then we figured out how to form commodities into goods. We became an industrial economy. But eventually goods became so standardized that they became commodities and everything was about lowest price. Then came customization of goods, which be definition entailed offering service that would distinguish goods. Enter the service economy. But now, due to the internet revolution, services are almost a commodity. What many people are now looking for is an experience from their economic exchanges. Studies already show that many people scope out products on the internet but still go to a brick and mortar store for the shopping experience.

It sounds like Johnson is in accord with Pine's perspective. Johnson's critics are legion right now. It will be interesting to see if he pulls this off.

The first neighborhood to get Google Fiber,
known on the map as Hanover Heights but locally as the Kansas City
Startup Village, is the new home of early stage startups co-locating
near one another to collaborate, leverage resources and to build a
community based around growing a tech business.

“The number of startups in this region of several blocks is over 10
now, but it’s happened quickly and every day I hear of someone new
moving in,” Mike Farmer of mobile search app Leap2 tells Mashable. “The Kansas City Startup Village was not formed with some grand strategy or goal in mind — it came together organically.”

Leap2 is among the first wave of startups moving to the village. In
early November, the company — which was founded in 2011 — moved its
offices from a non-Google Fiber neighborhood in Kansas City to a
connected one. The KC Startup Village consists of other companies such
as Local Ruckus, Eye Verify, Trellie and Form Zapper, as a part of an
initiative to make it a new startup tech hub. ...

"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their
surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things
(IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M)
connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.

Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the
lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet
are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to
start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear
your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your
favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After
you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a
drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder.
Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly
adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also
text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.

Your smart TV
automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat
breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten,
while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone
to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you
that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no
longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved
one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud.
Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors
locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save
energy and money.

Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."

4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.

"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study
of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income
workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line). The study looks
at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program
formerly known as Food Stamps). The bottom line is that the
average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30
percent. In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired
and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect,
the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal
tax rates at the top of the income distribution. This means that we
could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a
flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve
approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."

7. What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.

Nov 21, 2012

... From here [Des Moines] to Omaha to Kansas City — a region known more for its barns
than its bandwidth — a start-up tech scene is burgeoning. Dozens of new
ventures are laying roots each year, investors are committing hundreds
of millions of dollars to them, and state governments are teaming up
with private organizations to promote the growing tech community. They
are calling it – what else? – the Silicon Prairie.

Although a relatively small share of the country’s angel investment
deals – 5.7 percent – are done in the Great Plains, the region was just
one of two (the other is the Southwest) that increased its share of them
from the first half of 2011 to the first half of this year, according
to a report commissioned by the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley
Bank and CB Insights. About 15 to 20 start-ups, most of them
tech-related, are now established each year in eastern Nebraska, a more
than threefold increase from five years ago, according to the Omaha
Chamber of Commerce. Today, there is more than $300 million in organized
venture capital available in the state, as well as tax credits for
investors; six years ago there was virtually none, according to the
chamber.

About a dozen start-ups have flocked to a single neighborhood in Kansas
City, Kan., alone after Google Fiber installed its first ultrafast
Internet connection there last week. And over the past seven months,
about 60 start-ups have presented their ideas in Kansas City at weekly
forums organized by Nate Olson, an analyst with the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. In Iowa, Startup City Des Moines,
an incubator financed with $700,000 in public and private money,
including a quarter-million dollars from the state, received
applications from 160 start-ups over the past two years. It has accepted
nine so far....

7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president

8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)

13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more amazing. "The latest invention from Stanford University’s Department of Electrical
Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A
self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of
professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford

"A
flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a
place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time,
then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and
artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications,
social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12]
How do you define a church?"

Nov 13, 2012

... In Latin America, Mexico City is not unique. Use of social media is
growing at a breathtaking pace across the region. When Facebook passed
the 1 billion user mark in October, few people noticed that 19 percent
of those users live in Latin America (which only accounts for 8 percent
of the world's population). The governments of virtually all large Latin
American cities now use social media to engage with citizens, and
smaller cities are quickly following suit. The Inter-American
Development Bank recently found that social media is used by governments
in 70 percent of the region´s 140 "emerging cities" (those having
100,000 to 2 million residents and above-average economic growth rates).

Although the press has focused on Latin American presidents who have
embraced social media as a potent new channel for old-fashioned
political communications, something very different is happening at the
municipal level.

Mayors seem to be betting that by micromanaging urban issues via
Twitter or Facebook, they will give voters concrete evidence of their
effectiveness in office. This is a risky tactic, of course. Many local
governments that find it easy to virtually "engage" with constituents
may not have the budgets, the organization, or the staff to actually
solve the problems that generate complaints. The result, in that case,
could be a voter backlash amplified, ironically, over the same social
media channels. ...

... Over the coming decade, hundreds of millions of city dwellers in
emerging economies such as Mexico, Brazil, India and China are likely to
rise from poverty. Much has been written about how their increasing
expectations will pressure governments like never before to deliver
tangible improvements that make urban life safer, healthier, and more
egalitarian.

I predict that social media will have a highly disruptive but largely
positive effect in this context. At a minimum, these technologies will
give new vitality to the ancient ideals of participation and
accountability. At best, they might shorten the wait for new lights in a
darkened park. In either event, the next mayor of Mexico City, like
others across the developing world, will not really have the option of
ignoring social media. That's where people are choosing to speak, and
where they expect to be heard.

Nov 12, 2012

AFRICA’S “mobile decade”, when telephones at last reached most corners
of the continent, has meant a huge improvement in the lives of the poor.
But quantifying it is hard. How useful can a mobile phone be to someone
living on less than $2.50 a day, the World Bank’s standard benchmark of
poverty? Researchers in Kenya have given a partial answer. They find
that people will skip a meal or choose to walk instead of paying for a
bus fare so that they can keep their phone in credit. ...

... Still, only 16% of respondents said they were using their phones to
browse the internet. The real breakthrough in the Kenyan market has been
in people’s ability to send and receive money, with more than
two-thirds doing so by phone. East Africa’s biggest success has been
M-Pesa, a mobile-based money-transfer system pioneered by Safaricom, a
leading Kenyan operator. Its simple interface, which works on any phone,
has brought financial services to Kenya’s poor majority, enabling the
movement of some $8.6 billion in the first half of this year. ...

There has been a big interest in microfinance in recent
years. The aim of many organizations was to make loans available to the poor so
they could start businesses and foster economic growth. But Daryl Collins, et
al., in Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day, show
that business formation is not the highest priority for the poor. They had
hundreds of poor families in India, Bangledesh, and South Africa fill out
diaries recording their financial transactions for one year. What they learned
is that the biggest financial challenge the poor have is cash flow management.
Money does not come in in a steady stream across the year. Yet if you save up
money is very difficult to keep it safe. Having the money readily at hand also
makes it harder not to spend. Banking by phone is proving to be a major impact
on financial management for the poor. With increased ability to manage finances
will also come a greater capacity for entrepreneurial activity.

In
a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their
attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered
paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now
requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly
allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was
announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how
they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to
pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper,
visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly
those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an
experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the
paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and
willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive
proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both
support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react
negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be
facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.

... Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward
progress in achieving greater peace and stability. There are fewer wars
now than at any time in decades. The number of people killed as a result
of armed violence worldwide is plunging as well — down to about 526,000
in 2011 from about 740,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. ...

... Most top Pentagon officials say the statistics showing that the world is
safer are irrelevant and don’t reflect the magnitude of the risks. The
result is what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has dubbed a “security paradox.” The world may seem safer,
Dempsey says, but the potential for global catastrophe has grown as the
planet has become more interconnected and potential enemies have greater
access to more powerful weapons and technology. ...

9. How much difference is there in the coming of age experience between Baby Boomers and Millennials? Mother and daughter team Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig are interviewed about their new book: What’s the Matter With Millennials?

"The online startup Kaggle assembles
a diverse group of people from around the world to work on tough
problems submitted by organizations. The company runs data science
competitions, where the goal is to arrive at a better prediction than
the submitting organization's starting 'baseline' prediction. Results
from these contests are striking in a couple ways. For one thing,
improvements over the baseline are usually substantial. In one case,
Allstate submitted a dataset of vehicle characteristics and asked the
Kaggle community to predict which of them would have later personal
liability claims filed against them. The contest lasted approximately
three months, and drew in more than 100 contestants. The winning
prediction was more than 270% better than the insurance company's
baseline.

Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are
won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge — who, for
example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates
despite having no experience in health care — and so would not have been
consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions. In many
cases, these demonstrably capable and successful data scientists
acquired their expertise in new and decidedly digital ways"

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism;
they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in
moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their
monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean
striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to
correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America
was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be
hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the
post–Reagan Republican Party."

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."
I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten
minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had
gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided
nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been
raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be
fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say
anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys
around the table nodded in agreement."

8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

Nov 01, 2012

A team of University of Washington students has developed a machine that can "print" large plastic objects out of garbage.

When he was working for the Peace Corps in Ghana and Panama, Matthew
Rogge started to dream of turning waste plastic, abundant and freely
available, into useful objects that would solve vexing Third World
engineering problems.

Sound far-fetched?

He and a team of University of Washington students have done it.

Last week, Rogge — who went back to school to become a mechanical
engineer precisely to learn how to do this — and two fellow student
engineers won an international competition for their proposal to turn
plastic garbage into composting toilets.

They've developed an inexpensive 3-D printer that can turn shredded, melted plastic waste into just about anything.

3-D printers have been around for at least 25 years, although they
have become more widely available, better-known and cheaper in recent
years. They use computer-aided design to create three-dimensional
objects by laying down super-thin layers of a material, such as plastic,
much like a regular printer lays down ink.

But until now, nobody had figured out how to cheaply build a
large-scale printer that used recycled plastic as its raw material, said
UW mechanical-engineering professor Mark Ganter. ...

Oct 29, 2012

And that's something of a challenge for the collaborative encyclopedia going forward

For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive.

But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?

It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia's pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There's always going to be some tidying -- better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting -- but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. "There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add," writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History. ...

Oct 27, 2012

Each week I spend considerable time scanning headlines as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day I select one or two to link and discuss. A number of interesting stories never make it on to the blog.

So this week I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!

3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and
undeserving poor. Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to Support the undeserving poor.

"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter
on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no
philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret
this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."

Oct 26, 2012

Open source shouldn't just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.

FORTUNE -- The term "open source" was first coined in response to
Netscape's January 1998 announcement that the company would make freely
available the source code for its web browser, Navigator. Since then,
the philosophies of universal access and free redistribution of source
code have revolutionized the software industry.

While we have seen how open source communities can foster creativity
and collaboration in software (think of the Android app store), open
source has not ventured too far beyond this space. This is partly
because software is inherently modular, instantly accessible from
anywhere, and easily altered.

Yet open source ideas have tremendous potential beyond
software. All you need to create a successful open source community are
participants who both contribute to, as well as benefit from, shared
content. Such networks of transparency, collaboration, and trust can be
tremendously beneficial in other industries as well, from
pharmaceuticals to manufactured goods. ...

... Although the open source model has not yet been broadly applied to
manufactured goods, there are promising emerging examples --
particularly in the not for profit sector. One nonprofit group, Open
Source Ecology, is experimenting with ways to cheaply construct from
scratch over 50 crucial machines, from bakery ovens to back hoes, with
basic materials. Founder Marcin Jakubowski publishes all the blueprints
and schematics for each piece of his Global Village Construction Set
(GVCS) on a Wiki for contributors from all over the world to access and
tweak. Groups throughout the country have developed blueprints for Open
Source Ecology, while machines are prototyped and improved on the Factor e Farm
in rural Missouri. According to the group's website, 12 of the 50
machines are in their prototyping and documentation phase, including a
microtractor, backhoe, and CNC circuit mill. Through this construction
kit, Open Source Ecology aims to lower barriers to entry for farming,
building, and manufacturing in rural communities, urban neighborhoods in
need of renovation, and developing nations. ...

Despite early signs of success, there are, admittedly, real challenges
to implementing open source principles to for-profit manufacturing. ...

Oct 25, 2012

If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

... Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the
future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing
almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting
various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.

A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a
Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable
changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack
that does not deserve a serious answer.

A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs
since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are
continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the
Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human
brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain
and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed
by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do
all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The
economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930,
when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking
place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption."
Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours
a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.

I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can
do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly
hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of
leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human
well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical
restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure.
Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is
considered to be a huge problem.

Finally, people tell me that my
concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not
worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a
generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns
for the welfare of the next generation. ...

Vardi's point?

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

One of the challenges of creative destruction is that we can
see what is being destroyed but it is exceedingly difficult to see what is
being created. As we have moved through the industrial era into the modern age,
this fear that change was about impoverish the masses has been a recurring
them. Futurists like Gene Rodenberry saw a day where most goods would be so
plentiful or easily created that there would be little need for money or
possessions. You wouldn’t need a job as a means to survival.

What do you think? Do Yardi’s concerns worry you? Or is the
arrival of AI a godsend?

Oct 22, 2012

Many have been inspired by Star Trek to become scientists, and some are starting to make its gadgetry a reality.

Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre,
and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of
pointy-eared fun, there'll be a high proportion of scientists and
engineers.

Many have been inspired by Star Trek to take up a career in science, technology or engineering.
I think the franchise deserves more respect as a science popularisation
medium – how many other prime-time TV shows would allow their
characters to toss out phrases like "I performed a Fourier analysis on
the harmonics, Captain"?

Since its inception in 1966, Star Trek
has familiarised us with the lingo and applications of science. At
least, that was the case for me. I felt pretty disenfranchised from
science at school: it wasn't until I discovered science fiction that I
realised I could understand "difficult" technical concepts.

Since
the show began, many of us have become more tech-savvy than we could
possibly have imagined at school. More than that, we're now seeing
emergent technology here on Earth that was once little more than a Star
Trek scriptwriter's dream. To get you in the mood for this weekend's
festivities, here's a roundup of some of the best Star Trek-inspired
technology.

Replicators - ... Three-dimensional printers have been on the open market commercially for most of the 21st century. ...

Nanites - ... They've constructed a set of nanorobots, with inbuilt chemical sensors, that can silence genes within cancerous cells. ...

Androids - Japanese scientists have created some remarkably human-looking androids,
though they wouldn't beat Data in a game of three-dimensional chess. ...

Of course, we all ready have personal communication devices. But as someone recently pointed out, while we all have communication devices, we don't see people in Star Trek constantly looking down at them and running into things. ;-) Warp drive would be pretty cool. Any other Trekkie devices that you want to see?

Oct 19, 2012

... Grocery stores that found success on the internet are instead returning
to the physical world with a hybrid business model: the "virtual"
supermarket, a shop for smartphone users that carries photographs and
bar codes instead of food. After the success of locations in mass
transit stations from Seoul to Philadelphia, the virtual supermarket is about to hit the city above ground. Chinese supermarket giant Yihaodian announced this week it is opening 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations. ...

... Grocery stores want to reach time-starved commuters, but they also seem
to be capitalizing on consumers' desire to browse. It's one of the
reasons why many people at least claim to still prefer physical
bookstores, even as the monstrous success of websites like Amazon seem
to negate that notion.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Yihaodian has also experimented with
subway stores, but the announcement this week marks a big move back into
physical space. No longer will "virtual supermarkets" be only in mass
transit stations. They'll occupy actual retail space in the city.

Oct 17, 2012

Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here's where companies are headed next. ...

So what's the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get
rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post
and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style.
Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be
broadcast--with a click--to the world. Conversations
isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And
it’s worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well
be reading email its last rites. Here’s why:

Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email ...

Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. ...

Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. ...

Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company can’t. ...

Oct 01, 2012

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew
up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD
went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry
sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped
unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in
roughly the same 30-year cycle.

Compact discs had been pressed before 1982, but the first CD to officially go on sale was Billy Joel's 52nd Street.

The CD was supposed to have the last word when it came to convenience
and sound quality. And for a while, it did. The CD dominated record
sales for more than two decades — from the late 1980s until just last
year, when sales of digital tracks finally surpassed those of physical
albums. It's a cycle that has played out many times in the history of
the music industry, with remarkable consistency.

Sam
Brylawski, the former head of the recorded sound division at the
Library of Congress, says, "If you look at the last 110, 115 years, the
major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy."

He
says one of the biggest factors driving this cycle is a desire on the
part of manufacturers to sell new players every generation or so. "The
real money — the real profits — for companies have been in the sales of
hardware. That is to say, machines that play back recordings." ...

Sep 14, 2012

Managing irrigation pumps and water systems is a difficult and costly
task for many farmers in developing countries. The amount of time and
energy farmers spend watering their crops often compromises time that
could otherwise be used for family and community obligations. It also
compromises their safety at night, when they are most vulnerable to
animal predators. A new innovation from the India based company, Ossian Agro Automation, called Nano Ganesh
seeks to transform the way farmers manage their water systems by giving
them the freedom to turn pumps on and off, from any location, with
their mobile phone. ...

... In 2008 Ostwal altered the technology so that it could function over
an unlimited range granting farmers the flexibility to start and stop
the flow of water from anywhere there is a mobile connection.
Nano Ganesh also allows farmers to check the availability of
electricity to the pump and verify the on and off status of its
operation. Both of these features offer cost-saving benefits to farmers
who otherwise may not be able to shut their pumps off before their
fields have become overly saturated. This is important for two reasons.
One is that over-watering can lead to soil erosion
and nutrient depletion. The second reason is that the inability to
remotely shut-off water pumps leads to unintentional water and
electricity waste. With the help of Nano Ganesh farmers will be able to
conserve water and electricity more effectively. This will minimize the
environmental and financial costs of farming. In fact, the product description
suggests that farmers can recover the cost of the technology in just 11
days from the water and electricity savings it will produce. ...

Sep 11, 2012

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With Google’s promise last year to wire homes,
schools, libraries and other public institutions in this city with the
nation’s fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long
forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a
potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational
opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to
build in their communities.

But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where
enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the
service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white
neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of
black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday.

The specter that many blacks in this city might not get access to this
technology has inflamed the long racial divide here, stoking concern
that it could deepen. ...